


Run to Ground

by Pemm



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-27
Updated: 2013-12-27
Packaged: 2018-01-06 07:15:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1103991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pemm/pseuds/Pemm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sniper listened, though not to Scout's words. One didn’t spend hundreds of hours watching people through rifle scopes without winding up anything less than an expert on body language.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run to Ground

The deer started it.

The deer—a white-tailed buck—had come from one of the crowded stands of birch trees that stood on either side of the dirt road. The dirt road was slush and mud from the dregs of winter, iced over in places where the February wind had hardened it, and fog enveloped the still wood. It collected on the van’s windshield and reflected its headlights as it forged ahead perhaps a bit too quickly.

So when the deer leapt into the road not five yards from the van, there was very little anyone could do, except—

“Shit, look out!”

The brakes screamed. The windshield buckled and shattered. Cursing filled the air, mixed with the panicked squeal of the animal. The van skidded in the slush, swerved, and with a mechanical groan leaned sideways on its tires a few dangerous degrees before thumping back to earth. The engine sputtered and died.

The buck kicked its legs twice. More shards of glass slid into the now-exposed cab. Sniper slowly let out his breath, staring at the points of the antlers bristling inches from his face.

“All right, mate?”

“Uh, yeah, yeah I’m fine, I’m peachy.” Scout was plastered as deep against the back of the passenger seat as he could go. Glass littered his lap. “Doin’ great. Holy crap.”

“Good.” Slowly, Sniper lifted both hands, grabbed the buck’s antlers, and pushed. The animal bellowed, tossing its head, but his grip held steady.

“It’s alive still?” Scout asked, his voice still a little higher-pitched than normal. Glancing at him, Sniper could see the whites of his widened eyes. City kids.

As if to answer his question, the deer gave a mighty thrash and slipped from the newly dented hood, the tips of its horns nearly catching Sniper across the hand. It stumbled a few steps, then staggered back into the trees.

 

* * *

 

“So we’re what, we’re stuck here? We’re seriously stuck here.” Another ice-hard pinecone went flying as Scout kicked it. “I knew I shoulda gone with hardhat.”

“Believe he kicked you out to walk the rest of the way, last time.”

“Yeah well it ain’t my fault he don’t appreciate baseball none. An’ I beat him there, too, he ain’t got nothin’ on me with that crap truck, you gotta be kiddin’ me. Where are we even? You know, yeah?” Scout tagged behind as Sniper collected the shattered glass in a cardboard box that had been sitting in the camper for ages. “You know all that crazy stuff, right, you can look at the stars an’ be like yeah we’re two miles off the next town?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly, what’s that mean, not exactly? We ain’t gonna just sit here are we? We got a fight tomorrow. An’ it’s freakin’ cold. Where’s the map?”

“Gave it to Medic an’ them before they left.”

“What the hell’d you do that for?”

“’Cos they’ve not been to Viaduct by this route before. An’ Pyro burned the map they had.”

 “Fine, whatever, but you know the way, right?”

“’Course. Be a bit cold, no windshield, but ought to be able to make it up t’the next town.”

But when Sniper turned the key in the ignition, the engine did not make a sound. An acrid smell hung around the hood. He tried again, and the smell got worse. “That’s a problem,” he murmured.

“You’re jokin’,” Scout said.

 

* * *

 

Scout’s sixth-oldest brother was a mechanic, he said, and man if he was here we’d be gone in ten minutes, and hey Scout had spent tons of time watching him do his thing in his garage, let him take a look at the car, what, no, don’t close the freakin’ hood, how do you open it again? Geez, nobody wants no help no more.

“We’ll just have to wait ’til someone else comes along.”

“We ain’t seen nobody else all day, that’s stupid, here, look, I can go an’ run to the next town, find help, I don’t wanna just sit here, man, team’s gonna be useless without me.”

Sniper glanced at him over his shoulder as they clambered into the chilly interior of the camper. “You know the way?”

“Well no but I mean there’s a road, don’t take bein’ Edison to follow a road.”

“Ever had frostbite?”

“Frostbite, what, I ain’t gettin’ no frostbite, I can outrun frostbite,” Scout said, but he caught the scarf Sniper tossed to him. The tip of his nose was already red.

By the time Sniper got the stowed-away generator going on the camper’s rarely-used heater, Scout had scrambled up onto the shallow mattress tucked away above the cab. “Awesome, s’like a bunkbed,” he said, grinning. “Man, you hadta fight like hell to get a top bunk in my house, except Ross, Ross he don’t like heights, and this one time Anthony pushed Jake off’a one and Jake hit his mouth on a desk and he lost a tooth, so Jake don’t like the top bunks much either.”

“How many brothers is it you’ve got again?”

“Seven. An’ a sister, Annabelle, but she eloped way back, we ain’t none’a us seen her in ages. Writes, sometimes, anyway. Ma said she always figgered it’d happen, she eloped too with our dad, runs in the family y’know? You got any brothas’n sisters?”

“Can’t say as I do. Don’t think my parents wanted to chance another assassin.”

Scout snorted. “Aw man don’t get me started none, I dunno about you Aussies but us, y’know in Boston, place like that, place like Southie, you got kids runnin’ round everywhere an’ nothin’ to do but start fights, all of us barely skipped juvie, even Annabelle she once broke this other girl’s nose…”

There was a word for this particular phenomena, Sniper thought later, after Scout had detailed his siblings’ exploits, skimmed over his absentee father, and was launching into an exhaustive explanation of why he had been completely justified in getting into a fistfight with his brothers over whether or not you needed an apron to cook breakfast, and who got to wear it. Inertia, that was it. An object set in motion stays in motion.

 

* * *

 

To call Sniper a light sleeper was a grave misnomer. In was more accurate to say he barely slept at all. The fact of the matter was he woke up before Scout woke himself up.

Scout had talked without ceasing for nearly two hours, and rather than annoyed Sniper found he had been rather impressed. That took stamina, and Scout had never repeated himself, and even managed to keep going while eating the emergency rations Sniper kept precisely for occasions like this. The yawning had started around ten or so by Sniper’s watch, and to his surprise his teammate had gone straight to bed. Sniper had let him have the mattress, since he’d been so thrilled with it. It had always been a little short anyway.

Gave him a bit of peace and quiet, at least. He felt like he needed it after subjecting his ears to a full day of Scout running his mouth. He let himself steep in it for another hour before turning in.

Later, well into the night, a thump against the camper’s metal siding sent his eyes flying open. A bird on the roof, he thought at first, until it came again, coupled with a fitful motion from up on the bed. Scout’s foot.

Sniper squinted up at him in the darkness. Scout kicked the wall again, rolled over, and then sat straight up. The camper echoed as he banged his head on the roof. An indecipherable string of cursing followed. “Problem?” Sniper asked.

“Problem, what, n, no, no I just, ‘course not, no. No.” He could hear Scout gulp down air. “I uh, shit, just a, y’know, ain’t jack shit, I gotta just, I gotta…”

As Sniper watched he could see the boy’s eyes lose focus, staring into the middle distance and seeing nothing at all. “Scout?”

Scout flinched badly enough he nearly nailed the roof with his head again. “Gotta,” he said again, dazedly climbing down off the bunk. “Where’s, the hell’re my shoes.”

“By the door. Why?”

“I just, I’m gonna go run,” Scout muttered, dropping down from the bed.  When Sniper caught his arm he bared his teeth like a dog. “Leggo!”

“It’s a blizzard,” Sniper said evenly. “An’ you’ve got a sweater and not much else. Stay put.”

“Hey, screw you, man, you ain’t got no business tellin’ me nothin’,” Scout said, wrenching his arm free. He stomped the whole three paces to the back of the camper and jerked open the door. A heavy blast of winter wind caught him full in the face, snowflakes burrowing into his thin clothes. He yelped and slammed it again.

Sleep-dazed and wild-eyed, Scout stared at the door like it had bitten him. He swayed once on his feet, then looked around. His eyes locked on Sniper, as if he had only just realized he was there. “What, what’s somethin’ I was talkin’ about earlier?” When Sniper didn’t answer right away, just blinked at him, a desperate kind of gesture seized Scout’s hands and tried to throttle the air with them. “C’mon, man!”

“...Your brother’s tattoos. Ross, I think.”

“Ross,” Scout said, grabbing onto the name like a drowning man. He sank back against the wall, folding his arms tight across his chest. “Ross yeah he got, cuz tattoos you can’t get ‘em done legal in Massachusetts no more, right, I said that pretty sure, not since ’62 or ’63, couple years back, but Ross he’s nuts for ‘em, he was runnin’ off to Providence more days’n he wasn’t, if he wasn’t gettin’ inked he was watchin’ other people doin’ it…”

He leapt back into his brother’s life story, telling Sniper most of the same things he had earlier in the evening. This time he lacked the animation. Sniper listened, though not to his words. One didn’t spend hundreds of hours watching people through rifle scopes without winding up anything less than an expert on body language.

First thing Sniper could tell you about Scout was he never measured his movements. Never. Economy couldn’t possibly exist in his dictionary. Every motion he ever made was as loud as he was, gestures designed to maximize attention. The sheer volume of it made it all the more obvious when it was not there. The Scout that Sniper watched now was hunched over himself, only his hands moving as he spoke. His eyes had fixed themselves on the floor, lifting only occasionally, as if to make sure Sniper was still there.

Ten, maybe fifteen minutes passed before Scout had vented whatever it was that had him acting wrong. He trailed off mid-sentence, blinked, and looked at Sniper. “I uh.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, uh, that’s, okay. I’m done, I’m good.”

Sniper leaned back in his chair. “Feelin’ better?”

“Better, what, I’m fine, I ain’t never been better.” He straightened up, cracked his knuckles, turned to look out at the storm between the half-shuttered blinds. “Um. Sorry.”

“S’alright.”

Silence crept in through the window. Sniper had nearly let himself start drifting back to sleep when Scout said, “I don’t think I woulda been happy ‘bout goin’ runnin’ out in that in the end.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Just that’s what I’m used t’doin’, y’know, down in the New Mexico bases, it’s warm all the time, it’s quiet, ain’t nobody notices if you’re goin’ runnin’ at three in the morning, an’ back home nobody cares s’long as you ain’t causin’ no trouble. So that’s, I just go an’ run ’til I stop needin’ to, then I’m good, then I go home, I go back to sleep or I stay up or whatever an’ it’s fine.” Scout paused, fidgeting with the drawstring on the blinds. “Shit. I ain’t stayin’ up tonight.”

He clambered back up onto the bed, and narrowly missed smacking his skull against the ceiling again. Sniper watched from the corner of his eye as the kid burrowed into the blankets and pulled the pillow over his head.

That was interesting.

 

* * *

 

Sniper had risen with the sun, same as always. Lucky thing, too: ten minutes after he’d gotten the coffee going, an aging Nash Rambler came trundling down the dirt road. In another five it was off again, the little old woman inside still shouting how lovely her mechanic was and that she’d send him right on down quick as the place opened.

By then Scout was up, making faces at the black coffee he’d helped himself to. “You don’t even got any sugar, I mean I ain’t expectin’ cream but sugar, man, c’mon, who drinks this shit black?”

“Most of the team, actually.”

“Gross, you’re all nuts.”

Breakfast was old summer sausage and stale crackers, though Scout complained about neither. Sniper’s remark about the team seemed to have left him determined to finish his mug, sugar or not, so he focused on complaining about that instead. He worked his way about halfway through the cup and seemed to be running out of new things to hate about it, and in the lull in the one-sided conversation Sniper said, “I get ‘em too.”

“Get what?”

“Nightmares.”

“...Oh.” Scout looked up at him for a fraction of a second, then back into his coffee. He was quiet for a whole thirty seconds. “’Bout what?”

“Same things as you, probably. Most of the team does, near as I can tell. Other things, too, me own things, but a man don’t die half a dozen times a day for months an’ years and come out roses.” Sniper sipped his coffee. “Unless you’re Pyro, maybe, but everything’s roses with him.”

“Burned roses, maybe, the weirdo,” Scout said. “I uh. Thought it was just me, I ain’t, I mean I ain’t no chicken, but like back home—nobody’s got a rocket launcher back home, man, nobody’s got no flamethrowers or nothin’ like that, it’s maybe brass knuckles and shivs an’ those they can get real bad too but did—I mean I ain’t never seen exactly what it was a minigun does t’somebody point-blank before I got here, y’know? I ain’t never hadta—” The words were coming too quickly out of his mouth, and one got stuck. Scout paused and took a huge gulp of his coffee. “...Last month just, I remember this one time, I’d got both my legs ripped off and my arm was bendin’ in three places an’ I can’t even remember how bad it hurt, that’s how bad it was I just plain blocked it out I think, I just was stuck like that ’til Spy came an’ he put me down an’ I was beggin’ him to do it. That don’t—that don’t happen at home. It don’t happen at home an’ when I’m up I don’t think about it hardly but some nights, y’know, it’s, it ain’t good.”

He glanced up at Sniper again, and Sniper waited, listening.

“So, I mean, just, last night, thing is, I wanna say—I wanna say thanks cuz I needed, I hadta do somethin’ so’s I wasn’t thinkin’ about it no more, after—after one’a those I either gotta run or talk, talk or run, I don’t even remember what the hell it was I was sayin’, didn’t matter even, just—yeah. So, so yeah. Thanks.” He paused for breath, then lifted his mug. “Uh, cheers?”

Ceramic clinked and Sniper offered him a smile.

“No worries, mate.”

**Author's Note:**

> My secret santa for [teafortteu](http://teafortteu.tumblr.com)! The prompt was Scout and Sniper being friends; "the idea of a mouthy kid needing someone to listen to him and Sniper needing someone to care that he's there to listen." I hope you enjoyed it!


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